Dismé shook her head in frustration. "I don't understand."
There was a muttering between the two voices. Dismé started to turn, but heavy hands on her shoulders kept her faced toward the water. "Tell her," said the woman. "Arnole said to."
"If she'll be quiet and listen!"
Dismé shut her mouth. After a moment's pause the voice went on: "As soon as Bastion was settled, people began moving over the border. So far as the Regime was concerned, that was desertion, so they sent armed teams out to wipe out the deserters, along with anyone who got in the way! They used to go thundering out of Bastion on killing sprees every spring before planting and every fall after harvest."
"They always say there's no one out there," murmured Dismé. "Just demons and devils and monsters..."
"People," said the voice in a disgusted tone. "Just people, like you, like me, some of them farmers, some of them runaways from Bastion, some of them people traveling in caravans from one city to another."
"Cities?" Dismé breathed. "Out there?"
"Cities, yes. Some on the New West Coast. Some to the east. As far as the people outside are concerned, Bastion is a boil on the world's rear end, and they stay well away from it. There's another city in the mountains south of here, called Chasm, and it's been there since before the Happening. We people who were being slaughtered asked Chasm for help, and Chasm provided some excellent weapons so we could target the leaders of the raiders. It doesn't do any good to kill underlings, not with a Regime like Bastion. They just pop some tissue in a bottle and pretend the person is still there. We had to get the ones at the top, and we had to be sure there was nothing left of the bodies. No bodies, no bottles. No bottles, no being re-created by the Rebel Angels.
"Well, that went on for a few years, long enough to make leading war parties very unpopular. Meantime, we'd made a deal with Chasm. There's no agricultural land where they are, and we're happy to provide food in return for manufactured things. When we'd slaughtered enough of the Spared to make them more reasonable, we offered them a deal: we'd provide things they needed and couldn't make for themselves, like machines, if they'd stop raiding us and taking our children."
"Machines?" asked Dismé. "What machines?"
"Well now, that's interesting. My grandfather was one of the negotiators. According to him, our side suggested things like medical equipment and power looms and farm equipment and glass-making machinery, but that wasn't what Bastion wanted. They said comfort and contentment and health weren't important, they weren't lifeful things. They wanted punishment Chairs and batteries to run them and nutrient bottles for their bottle walls. Things to gain them credit when the world ends. Which they expect rather soon."
"Lifeful," said Dismé. "Yes. That's what they call Chairs and bottles. Lifeful. And if you provide them, that must mean you're demons."
"That's a Regime label. We're people, just like you are, and this series of caverns is one of our routes to and from Apocanew. A team of us goes in every day or so, to the place they put their useless people and the dead. We put the heretics in Chairs for them, and we put tissue in bottles, and we sedate and transport the so-called useless people out of Bastion. Other teams do the same in other cities. That way we can keep an eye on all of Bastion, to be sure it's living up to the agreement."
"Heretics?" breathed Dismé. "They're not heretics. They just have The Disease."
"The only disease they have is the disease of doubt or of being in someone else's way," snarled the voice. "Which is heresy so far as the Regime is concerned. Recently they've been getting uppish again, so we're going to have to settle them down."
"Who do you mean when you say we?" demanded Dismé.
The woman chuckled. "We. Let's see, if you include everyone who detests Bastion and all its works, it's a rather large group. We're allied with the rebels inside Bastion."
"Rebels?" asked Dismé. "There are rebels?"
"There are, and I'm not going to tell you about them, and you wouldn't remember if I did."
"And Arnole was one of your people?"
"Since he first volunteered to be abducted by your salvagers fifty years ago. He kept us informed of what went on inside the Regime. We could see and hear everything he saw and heard."
The woman interrupted. "He married a Bastion woman, an unfortunate marriage from our point of view, because she was already pregnant when he met her, and she had no sense to speak of. She was beautiful, however, and she was in danger of being bottled for illicit sexual relations—another thing the Regime is good at—and Arnole felt sorry for her. She was a lovely thing, a Comador girl who died when Ayward was quite young."
"Arnole wasn't Ayward's father?"
"No. Though Ayward was never told that. When Ayward was thirty ... I guess you were the one he was attracted to."
"How did you know?"
"You're not listening again! From Arnole, obviously. We saw everything that happened to him and around him. We know your whole life history, such as it is, better than you do."
"I doubt that," muttered Dismé, offended at his tone.
"Yes we do, including the fact that Ayward was attracted to you because you resembled his mother. And the fact that Rashel seduced Ayward and then told him she was pregnant. The Regime is fairly strict about such things, immorality being a symptom of The Disease. He chose to marry her instead. Later she told him she'd miscarried, and it was his fault, so to make it up to her he should help her get a job with the BHE."
Dismé cried, "I didn't know that!"
"Of course not," the man said. "But we did, because Arnole was a snoop and a gossip and damned clever besides. He was never actually sentenced to a Chair; he had us make it for him because being in a Chair was good cover. We made sure the Chair was comfortable. He used to sleep in the Chair a lot in the daytime, and then at night, with his door locked, he could get out of the thing and move around on his own. He used to disguise himself and wander all over Apocanew, cutting a swath through the married ladies and finding out all kinds of interesting things. He probably has a dozen sons or daughters out in Bastion somewhere."
"The Chair wasn't real? And he never told me."
"That Chair wasn't. The next one would have been."
"But, didn't the Regime know he'd never been sentenced? Wouldn't their records have told them..."
"Records. Ha. The Regime keeps its records like it keeps its pacts. Why would anyone suspect someone in a Chair was there voluntarily, and if they can't find the records, who cares. We could have removed him from Bastion before Ayward and Rashel were married, but he chose to stay."
"Why would he stay?" Dismé demanded.
"Because he had been very fond of Ayward's mother, sense or no sense, and he grew to be fond of Ayward, and then even fonder of you," said the male voice. "He thought you were something special, though I can't see why. You never followed his advice to get away from that damned family!"
Dismé felt her inner gates open, felt Roarer come out, didn't even try to stop it. "He didn't know Rashel!" she cried. "Not half so well as I did. If I had tried to go elsewhere in Bastion, she would have hunted me down and killed me, or worse. Even if I had left Bastion, she'd have found me or died in the attempt."
There was a shocked silence among the echoes, then the female voice asked, "Why? Why would she hate you enough to...?"
"I don't know," Dismé snarled. "Why did she hate my brother enough to kill him! Or my father enough to kill him also! If they had known, if I had known, we might have defeated her somehow. But we didn't know why."
"Your brother?" whispered Owen. "Your father?"
"Do you know this to be true?" the male voice asked.
"I know they were in her way and nothing stands in her way. Not when she was a child. Not now! I don't know how I know, but I do know!"
"But she hasn't killed you," objected the male voice. "She's had plenty of opportunity."
"I've played the role she gave me, and that kept me safe ... relatively," said Dismé tiredl
y. "I don't expect you to believe me. It wasn't something I could prove to Arnole. It wasn't something you'd find out merely by seeing what he saw. She doesn't show the world what she is."
"If Arnole had told you he was leaving, would you have gone with him?"
"If it wouldn't have put him at risk, and if I'd thought it would get me cleanly away from Rashel, I probably would," she said. "He never told me. He never asked me. I don't blame him for that if he really thought I couldn't keep it to myself..."
After a long pause, the female voice said, "It's irrelevant now, anyhow. Arnole didn't yell for help until he was threatened with a second Chair. Nobody in a second Chair is really alive, they're just cautionary examples for the populace. We came to get him in the middle of the night, and he suggested we transfer the link to you."
"Me?" she asked, surprised. "Me?"
"You. Yes. He said it might be useful to you. But we couldn't find you, not anywhere. So then he suggested Ayward."
"I went... out," she murmured, remembering. "That night, I went out to the wall..."
"Well, you picked a bad night for it," muttered the woman.
"Ayward never worked out, and when we pulled him out of that pond, he was still going on and on about Rashel betraying him and how he loved her and hated her and had to stay with her..."
"He was besotted with her," said Dismé bleakly.
The female voice interjected, "Say bewitched and you'll come closer to the truth. His attachment to her wasn't natural, even Ayward thought so. We've heard rumors..."
"Black magic," murmured Dismé. "Arnole thought so."
The male voice said, "That's nonsense. There's no such thing. Maybe being besotted simply runs in the family. Your showing up down here might indicate so."
"I'm not part of his family, and I came because I thought Ayward was lying down here in agony. All this other stuff is just plockutta, and I'm tired of listening to it!"
The voices murmured together. The female voice said, "We'll leave you to get a bit of rest. You'll find drinking water and a privy on the other side of the pond."
Dismé, face flaming, waited until the murmurs and footsteps stopped, then took off the blindfold and laid it on the blanket beside her. She found a rock privy on the far side of the pond, and nearby, hollowed into a pillar, was a basin beneath a spring, the overflow glossing the floor of the cavern. She splashed her face and neck, cooling her anger and embarrassment as she cleaned away the dust of the caverns. A glass pitcher stood amid a clutter of cups on a nearby shelf. When she had slaked her thirst, she went back to the blanket and dug out the bread and cheese she had provisioned herself with.
She felt overcome with weariness. The cavern swayed slightly, and she put a hand to her forehead. Exhaustion was understandable, she thought. There'd been all too little sleep lately. As though on cue, the male voice called from behind the pillars to don the blindfold.
Dismé did so, keeping her balance with some difficulty. Anonymous hands steadied her, and the woman's voice said, "Don't worry about getting home. We'll pick up Owen Toadlast and use his disappearance as an explanation for yours, Dismé."
"Pick him up..."
"Get him out of Bastion. Ayward asked us to. The boy left Faience this morning, and he won't object to our help."
Dismé put her hand to her head, which felt as though it were rocking. "You don't want me to stay here?"
"No. What we really want, though we have no right to ask, is for you to take Ayward's place as our contact. You picked a hell of time to go out of the house that night. What was that all about?"
"I just used to go out to a certain place on the wall. For some peace. But there were ouphs that night, a fog of them, like being lost in clouds of sad. And they were all around, I couldn't get away from them..."
Silence. Then, softly, "What did you say there were?"
What had she said? She couldn't remember. "Nothings," she murmured. "Nothings."
Muttering. Growling. The male voice, "So. You'd be willing to be our eyes and ears."
"If you do something for me!" The anger had stayed with her, busying itself by making white-hot red-rimmed bore holes through the haze that wrapped her. "I'll be your eyes and ears, if you'll get me safely away from Rashel."
The words took the last of her strength, and Dismé lowered her head into her hands. The dizziness increased, and had now turned into acute nausea. Perhaps it was having gone without sleep. Or all this clambering about.
There was a murmuring again, this time among several voices, one saying, "He thought she'd do well..." and the male voice interrupting, "... don't think this fear of being killed is quite credible ... not sure she's worth the trouble."
"Wolf!" said another female voice. "That's cruel."
"Well, look at the last ten years of her life! She's behaved like a dishrag, limp as a dead snake. If she'd told Arnole what she really felt, he could have figured something out, but all she did was mush about! I say before we go to a lot of trouble, she should do something decisive herself, just to prove she can!"
"Wolf has a point," said the first woman's voice, close at Dismé's ear. "We'll arrange getting you away from Rashel, and then we'll see. We'll open some doors for you, but you'll have to walk through them on your own."
How dared they! Roarer came out of its lair again, like a red wave, and she felt it rise furiously, trying to find a way through the haze. When it could not, it slowly ebbed away. As it retreated, she followed it, floating after it, finding the place it went, a feeling place that smelled of iron and tasted of tears. In that place she heard an endless series of echoes. Mother. Roger. Father. Arnole.
She moved away, then returned to see if it was still there. It was. A twisted cavern that belonged to her, not only the structure of it but also the beast that snuffled inside it, growling and pressing against the walls to make them creak. She could feel it in there, and now she knew where it was, she could come get it, open the gate for it anytime she needed it.
She felt herself nodding, unable to speak. Oh, let a door be opened. Even a door into a furnace where she could go through and burn away this man's words, like Rashel's words, hurtful and unkind. A dishrag. A dead snake. A limp nothing. Like Ayward. Useless. The dizziness faded into a tingling quiet. The woman's voice said, "We've given you a drug, in the drinking water. It won't hurt you. Just relax."
Later she heard the woman's voice saying: "Arnole was almost always right. He would say he was sure about something, and it always came true. Then there's the matter of the light..."
"She probably had a candle or something!"
"We found the lantern two-thirds of the way back, Wolf. We found no evidence of a candle. How did she get here in the dark?"
Something alive was thrust into Dismé's ear where it drilled its way into her head with hard, pincher feet. Before she could complain about the pain, it was replaced by momentary euphoria.
Another time she opened her eyes to see several figures walking away from her, silhouetted against a distant light. They had horns, bull's horns, curved like a lyre.
"Demons," she said, from a dry mouth. "Demons with horns."
"Nonsense," said the woman's voice. "They aren't horns. They're Dantisfan. We need Dantisfan down here. No matter, don't ask. Hush. Drink this. Now look at this and tell me what it is, silently. Now think these words: Courage. Determination. Help. Think louder, in color, the letters HELP, with jagged points around them! Help! Yes. That's very good."
"What I worry about," Dismé said, in a reasonable voice, "is those shots of Holy Truth they give us. I don't know how Arnole or Ayward kept quiet about all this, but I can't..."
"Hush," said the woman, again. "With a dobsi in your head, their drugs can't even touch you."
Later, someone said, "We'll arrange the opportunity, but you'll have to be resolute. Wolf's right. You'll have to prove you're worth our effort. Another like Ayward would be useless."
The words resonated, humming, like a tuning fork. Oppoooor tuuuunity.
Rezz ohhhh looot. Dismé grasped those words and hung onto them, though all else left her mind. She was inside a bell that went on ringing without ever being struck, a deep, harmonic reverberation, endless as time. She had drunk something very pleasant, and the sound had begun, fading very gradually into a quiet and welcome darkness.
30
dismé and the doctor
Dismé awoke in her room in the house at Faience, amid a circle of variously concerned, worried, or suspicious faces.
"What happened," Rashel asked, her eyes narrowed. "What happened to you, Dismé?"
Dismé asked, "Why are you all here in my room?"
Rashel snarled, "You were missing, Dismé. For two nights! Your window was broken. We brought in dogs. They couldn't find you anywhere. Then this morning, one of the restorers found you lying beside the road, right in plain sight."
"Morning?" she turned her head, seeing darkness outside.
Gayla said, "It's night, now. The doctor says you've been ... drugged. What happened to you?"
Dismé shook her head slowly, not wanting to agitate it in any way. Her brain felt full of... air.
She murmured, "I can't remember..."
She didn't remember! There was nothing recent in her mind! Every room in her brain had space in it, the windows were open and the breeze was coming in. How interesting! She did not remark on it, however. There was no reason to invite others into this emptiness. No matter who asked her what, she couldn't remember anything about Ayward or herself or Owen during the last few days. Instead, she complained of headache, tried to get on her feet and was promptly sick, which effectively ended the questions. She slept deeply, restfully, and they let her alone.
Four days later, the agents from BHE arrived to question her about the strange occurrence. The examination took a good part of an afternoon. Though they kept at it, the usual shot of Holy Truth elicited nothing at all. In the end, the agents reported that she had been abducted and drugged by Owen, the same drugs he used in Ayward's Chair. Loss of memory from Chair sedatives was not unknown. Dismé was judged to be an innocent victim, luckily unharmed and also untainted by demonish ideas or feelings.